Russian Trolls Pushed Vaccine Content Because Russiagate is Fake

There’s a mountain of evidence that the Russian trolls (around whom our politics now somehow revolve) operated like standard spammers, piggybacking on viral content to push their own agendas. That meant everything from pro and anti-Trump rallies, to fake Black Lives Matter accounts, pipeline protests and anything that was likely to tap into an interest group potentially sympathetic to their agenda.

Russian trolls weren’t just trying to cause division in U.S. politics. A new study shows that they were also trying to stoke divides in one of the country’s most heated debates around public health: vaccinations.

Russia-linked social media bots pushed divisive speech and misinformation on Twitter on both sides of the preexisting vaccine debate, according to research led by George Washington Universityand published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.

“These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” the study’s authors said.